


Change is the Only Constant

by ama



Series: Soldiers and Spies [3]
Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Affection, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Hair Brushing, M/M, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27177862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: With new challenges on the horizon, Costis has concerns about their tenuous life in Attolia. Kamet does not.
Relationships: Kamet/Costis Ormentiedes
Series: Soldiers and Spies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983791
Comments: 18
Kudos: 107





	Change is the Only Constant

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow-up to "Dreams the Same As Mine," taking place immediately after. Return of the Thief spoilers abound!

“How was he?” Costis asked as soon as they left Relius’s apartments, ducking his head to give some semblance of privacy.

“Fine,” Kamet said with a shrug. “Teleus worries too much.”

“You did not see him when Teleus took him out of the dungeons,” Costis said darkly. Kamet looked at him, and reconsidered his levity.

“No, I didn’t. He seems well to me, at least. He walked on his own power—more or less—to the gardens. We sat on a bench to talk, but he wasn’t winded and I saw no signs of illness or injury beyond what might be attributed to a long journey. I think the worst was the isolation. He is happy to have company, and feels guilty that people were worried over him.”

“He feels guilty for not sending word of his own secret imprisonment?”

“As we have already discussed, love makes fools of us all.”

That was true enough, and Costis considered the truth of it as they made the now-familiar walk back to Kamet’s rooms. They stopped at the door. Costis opened his mouth to say that he thought he might go back to the barracks tonight—he had been gone from the Guard for a long time, and thought it best not to separate himself too much, especially given his conversation with Teleus. Besides, his head was churning with thoughts he was not yet ready to voice, and he didn’t think he would be very good company.

Somehow, Kamet noticed. Before Costis could say a word, he tilted his head and looked up from under his lashes, his lips crooked in a fond smile. Costis’s mouth went dry. He allowed himself to be tugged inside by the elbow with no protest whatsoever.

“Something is worrying you,” Kamet said.

He dropped Costis’s arm and flitted around the room, shutting drawers and straightening papers and doing a million other little fidgety things. It was a ritual, before he went to bed—there was no hope of reigning in the chaos for an entire day, but he would wake to order, and that was enough. Costis sat on the end of the bed and unlaced his sandals.

“Teleus says my face always shows when I am thinking too hard.”

“And this worries you?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Costis could feel a steady heat rising in his cheeks, and he kept his head bent towards the floor.

“We talked a little about—personal matters. You know of their—arrangement?”

“Yes. What of it?” He looked over at Costis’s silence, and whatever he saw on his face compelled him to sit on the bedspread beside him. “You are… offended on your captain’s behalf at the lack of proper fidelity?” he guessed. “You are… concerned at the potential for intrigue this introduces to Relius’s life? A valid concern, given that his love life has already gotten him into trouble once before, although from what I understand, he keeps his affairs shorter now for just that reason.”

Costis looked at him.

“You are… worried that I want to follow his example,” Kamet said, eyebrows raised in shock. A smile tugged at his mouth, but he stifled it. “You think we are doomed to step into the footsteps of our predecessors in all respects, like the characters in a tragic play?”

“Be serious,” Costis beseeched him.

“I am serious. I presume that you and Teleus had a conversation that went along similar lines as mine with Relius, and I expected some concerns, but not _this._ What makes you think taking on a man’s position in court would lead me to adopt his romantic habits?”

Costis thought about fleeing the room with no reply whatsoever, or about retrieving the knife from under Kamet’s pillow and cutting off something small and relatively unimportant—a little finger, the lobe of an ear—so he could beg off in favor of finding the physician. He did neither.

“I am not very amusing compared to many of the people at court,” he said, the words dragged out of him against his will. “And there are certain stresses that are very different than those of our life before. We would be living in each other’s pockets, but you will inevitably have to keep secrets from me—and even if there are things you wish to share, I may not be clever enough to understand. Under those circumstances, it might be only natural for you to seek out better company, on occasion. I think I could do it,” he added miserably. “If it would make you happy.”

Kamet considered him for a moment. One moment stretched into two. He lowered his gaze to his lap, and a long sigh passed his lips.

“There is something I should tell you,” he said, and Costis’s heart dropped like a stone. “I have come to find you very dull, Costis. When we spent six months crammed into a shepherd’s hut no bigger than this room, with bugs in our hair and no topic of fresh conversation beyond the weather and speculation on the death of all we held dear, I never once longed for a change of scenery or companionship or even struggled with my temper.”

“Kamet,” Costis said, rolling his eyes.

“In fact, I found you more fascinating by the day. But now that we live in comfort, with any amount of stimulation—”

Costis covered Kamet’s mouth with his hand. The erstwhile slave looked up at him with sparkling eyes that gave away his grin, and Costis kissed his forehead.

“Do you remember when we met,” he said. “When you were too respectful to look me in the eye?”

Kamet wrapped his hand around Costis’s wrist and tugged his hand away. He kissed his palm and placed it over his own cheek.

“I remember.”

“I am not used to such teasing from you. From my king, yes, and Aris, and every single person in this entire court, but from you—”

“Poor Costis.” Kamet went to his desk and began to sort through the books and pamphlets he had arranged for Pheris to study. “Ignore me. I am in a good mood tonight, and you are being so endearingly idiotic. I could hardly resist.”

“It is different, being here,” Costis continued. He didn’t know why he was making this argument, but he pressed on out of perverseness. “You told me already what happened the one time you sought out a love affair in Medea, and in Roa I was the only one who knew the real you. In the palace, you could take your pick of admirers.”

“Costis,” Kamet said gently. “My heart. My dearest one. I had admirers in Roa.”

“You _did?”_

“So did you.”

_“Who?”_

“I would not break a confidence.”

“Who did you have a confidence with in Roa?” Costis demanded.

“Really, Costis. All four daughters at the farm a half-mile down were _constantly_ asking after your samples, and then they batted their eyelashes so much I’m surprised they could see them. It was just little things like that—harmless flirtations, and you don’t see me getting stroppy over it,” he sniffed, the irony apparently lost on him.

“I am not stroppy,” Costis mumbled.

He fell back on the mattress with a heavy sigh and stared up at the ceiling. The ceilings in the barracks were plain. He had no idea why the ceilings in the bedrooms of the palace needed to have complicated geometric designs stamped into the plaster, except that perhaps it was good for when one was sleepless and worrying and needed something else to focus on. It worked, a little bit.

“I am worried that you will be unhappy,” he admitted. “I have dragged you halfway across the world three times, and every time you make a life I tear you from it, and I am afraid that eventually you will realize that Costis Ormentiedes, plaything of the gods, is the common factor in all this chaos, and putting your life in proper order means getting rid of him.”

He leaned back, head tilting over the edge of the bed to look at Kamet upside-down. He had gone very still at his desk.

Kamet turned around and looked at Costis. He knelt and framed his face in both of his hands, kissing him on the underwise of his jaw on one side of his face and then the other, on one cheekbone and the other, on his eyelids when Costis closed his eyes, on the tip of his nose.

“Do you remember when you left?”

Costis swallowed. He preferred not to.

“Yes.”

“Sit up before you give yourself a headache.”

He obeyed.

They had a signal. Kamet always worked from a particular room in the sacred library, with a window, and in the first few days of their arrival he had woven three cords of bright cloth, one white, one blue, and one red. The white hung from the window always. He told his fellow scribes at the temple that it was a Setran custom, and no one had the knowledge or inclination to contradict his piety. When the white hung, Costis would know that all was well. If Kamet ever traded white for blue, he was to come to the temple with as much haste as possible—keeping in mind, Kamet said sternly, that he was to be undetected, not to crash through the city like a rampaging bull. If he ever hung the red, Costis was to flee without stopping to recover anything or anyone.

They had argued for a long time over the need for a red cord, but it didn’t matter now. They had never used it. Costis had seen the blue cord and took the emergency purse, a few days’ worth of food, and both their cloaks, and met Kamet in the courtyard of the temple complex. It was not as though the summons were a complete surprise. Kamet had suspected his letters to Relius were being stopped. Costis had noticed the scarcity of food and livestock, and ventured to some of the further villages to see how far this drought extended. They had spoken of these things in whispers.

That afternoon, Kamet had smiled warmly at him and spoken in a calm voice that would arouse no suspicion from passersby, talking of Put and ships and seventy thousand. He told Costis to go.

“What did I say to you?” Kamet asked now.

He had said many things. He had reminded Costis of every moment during their trip through Medea where he had slowed them down, impressed upon him the need for secrecy, and called him a three-times idiot with the thick skull of an elephant.

“You said ‘If you do not believe me, do as you like. If you love me, and believe that I would never lie to you again, then do as I say.’”

 _You will go to Attolia,_ he had said, clutching Costis’s head in his hands. _You will warn your king and your queen, and then you will come back to me. You will come back to me and I will be in this same spot, whole and hale and waiting._ If Costis closed his eyes, he might still remember the press of his lips, the prick of his teeth, his ragged breath as they parted. Kamet did not look fierce now, sitting on the floor serenely with his hands on his thighs, but that was only an illusion.

“Good,” he said. “Then believe me again when I say I love you and you alone, and nothing will ever change that.”

In Costis’s experience, falling in love was not something a man could control. In his experience, falling in love was remarkably similar to falling down a dry well, with nothing to do but scrabble at the walls and pray the gods would catch you. But if he continued to argue, Kamet was going to eject him from the rooms, and while he would be forgiven by the next morning, someone, somehow, would know he had been turned out. If nothing else, Aris would be unbearable for several days.

“I think we may have set a dangerous precedent in agreeing that loving you means doing whatever you say,” he said, managing a smile. “As our queen has so wisely and famously said, relationships in Attolia are based on mutual respect.”

“I would never contradict the queen,” Kamet said loftily as he stood.

“But?”

“Has the king ever refused her a single whim?”

Costis laughed.

“Would you still love me if I were as obedient as the king?”

Kamet shuddered.

“Perish the thought.” He took an ivory comb from a box on the dresser and sat down on the bed. “And even though I have no desire to imitate them, I hope you don’t think less of either Relius or Teleus for their arrangement. They are very happy, you know.”

“I know. I saw enough of them even before I left for Medea to know how strong their attachment was. But I can’t understand how the captain doesn’t get jealous.”

“I think he does,” Kamet said absently as he ran a hand through his hair, frowning when he encountered tangles.

He lifted the comb, then caught sight of Costis shifting hopefully closer, and surrendered it with a smile. Kamet had thick, black hair that grew in waves, and in the Mede Empire, he had always kept his it short, considering it a nuisance to care for and an unwelcome source of attention. But it had grown longer during their journey to Attolia, and again when they were hiding out in Roa. Costis found it endearing; he liked the way it looked and the way it felt running through his fingers, and he was more than willing to take on some of the labor, if it meant keeping Kamet from taking a knife to his hair out of pure exasperation.

“His sense of superiority saves him, though,” he continued as Costis ran his fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp and picking through the few remaining tangles. “He thinks Relius has bad taste and has been proven right many times, and that thought keeps him warm on the lonely nights.”

“Kamet!”

“I am only quoting Relius.”

The white teeth of the comb were stark against his dark hair, and Costis drew them through with care.

“Did he ask you if you would take over the role of secretary of the archives?” he asked, shifting the subject away from things that might make it hard to look his captain in the eye.

“No. He asked if you would take over the role of captain of the guard.”

Costis’s hands stilled for a brief moment. Kamet turned his head, just slightly, and he resumed his work.

“And what did you say?”

“I said it was one of your most cherished ambitions, and I wished him good luck getting you to admit it.”

“It’s a great responsibility,” Costis mumbled. “Especially now that the Guard is so reduced. Each man must do twice the work just as well, and for that, they need to be trained better, scheduled better. The captain needs to be more clever and better-informed.”

“A close personal relationship with the secretary of the archives would help with that.”

They were both quiet. Kamet was too still to be natural, and Costis could tell he was waiting for a response, but he did not push or prod. He waited until Costis finished with the comb and leaned over to set it on the bedside table, and then wrapped his arms around Kamet’s waist and hooked his chin over his shoulder.

“It would be dangerous.”

“And here I thought you were a soldier. Does danger frighten you so?”

“It would be dangerous for _you_.” He swallowed. “Yes. That frightens me.”

Kamet leaned back against Costis’s chest. He tilted his head back to kiss Costis’s temple.

“I am not frightened,” he said, and there was something hard in his voice that Costis had never heard before. It made him shiver. “Because the Mede scouting parties bypassed the capital entirely in favor of searching the coastal villages, and because Relius has just told me that he did _not_ tell the Braels ambassador the true story of where he would be traveling before he was captured. I am not frightened. I am angry. And for perhaps the first time in my life, there is something I can do with my anger, and it is something I am _good_ at. Even though it will be dangerous, and even though the danger is much nearer than either of us would hope.”

Kamet turned to face him, but Costis kept his arms locked around Kamet and would not let him go too far. The lamp was burning low, and the light made his eyes gleam like heather honey.

“Kamet, you look like a lion.”

His soft laugh sent shivers down Costis’s spine again, for very different reasons.

“You have no cause to fear lions, my heart.”

“No.”

The lamp guttered out, and Costis bent his head, seeking Kamet’s lips in the dark.


End file.
